postmodernism

Another idea I'd love to hear thoughts on is the connection between the condition of being as bare life and as Harraway's "blank surface" for inscription by power. In both cases, I read the situation as one in which a medium of separation between power and the rawest existence of human life seems to have been displaced.

I'm tempted to blame it more on how my experience of reading the book played out (a four and a half hour caffeine fueled rush) than on the material itself, but I felt more totally shocked and awed by the end of this book than any other we've read yet. Not that the material itself didn't play a decisive role as well: it hit a lot closer to home as being explicitly concerned with the most basic definitions of life itself, and the descriptions of Nazi experimentation on "VP"s were riveting in a completely horrifying car crash kind of way.

Anyone willing to review my Term Paper? Anyone not partnered off yet? Any altruists?

Even though in our reading I tend often to regard much of this theory as, whether it's intended to be so or not, having more to do with other theory than real life, ultimately one has to compare theoretical ideas with lived experience. It's always nice after all to be able to sort of have an idea of whether what you think someone is arguing squares with your impression of reality or not.

Something I'd like us to talk about in class today is whether Butler, who really does seem committed to finding (to crib capt. haddock) 'escape mechanisms' from this process of subordination and subjectivation, ever gives a convincing account of how those escape mechanisms would work. Haddock pointed to one escape mechanism on p.28, this notion of alterity, i.e.

...you can join the Judith Butler is my Homegirl facebook group, or just print out the Judith Butler theory.org.uk trading card, which lists her "strengths" as: "groundbreaking, constructive critical skills" and "weaknesses" as "increasingly impenetrable writing style".

On page 170, Butler (citing Freud) distinguishes between melancholia and mourning: in mourning, the object is "declared" lost, but in melancholia, no declaration is possible. Melancholia therefore paves the way for mourning.

Before reading The Psychic Life of Power, I had often thought of the performance of drag as a sort of simulacrum.

In reference to Hegel's story of the bondman and lord, Butler writes "If the object defines him, reflects back what he is, is the signatory text by which he acquires a sense of who he is, and if those objects are relentlessly sacrificed, the he is a relentlessly self-sacrificing being" (40). Someone like the bondsdsman will only recognize his identity if he also acknowledges the bleakness of his life. His ownership of anything is a fleeting one. Nothing tangible can ever define him because he ultimately has no control over the object.

Towards the end of the chapter "Subjection, Resistance, Resignification", Butler writes about the subversion (inversion) of pejorative terms into progressive usage. She argues that this is "a progressive usage that requires and repeats the reactionary in order to effect a subversive reterritorialization" (100). During this section of the reading, I remembered a personal experience with the muddiness of these distinctions.